Under pressure from the governor, advocates and a federal court, lawmakers are moving at breakneck speed to address the state’s failing child welfare system. But in doing so, they may be rushing into a privatization scheme that could plunge Child Protective Services (CPS) into crisis again.

In 2016, more than 200 children died of abuse and neglect in Texas. On any given day, there are hundreds of kids who are in imminent danger, yet go unseen by a caseworker with CPS, the troubled state agency that is responsible for protecting maltreated children through social services like foster care. For the children who are rescued, it’s possible they’ll end up sleeping in a hotel or CPS office because there aren’t enough foster homes.

Early into his tenure as governor, Greg Abbott said he was committed to overhauling the state’s struggling Department of Family and Protective Services, which oversees the foster care system. He was particularly focused on reducing child deaths as a result of abuse and neglect. From 2010 to 2014, 144 children died despite the fact that CPS was investigating claims of abuse in those cases. Back in 2015, Abbott’s office committed an extra $40 million to child welfare services.

Yet, also in 2015, a federal judge in Corpus Christi – in an order more than 250 pages long – ruled that long-term foster care in the state was unconstitutional. Putting it bluntly, she called it “broken.”

It was early July 2001, and Trish Virgil was going to make a lemon meringue pie. “In our family, 12 years old meant that you get to finally learn how to make homemade pies,” she says now, smiling.

But, Virgil says, when she got home from the store with her mother, police had surrounded their trailer. While they were out, Virgil’s older sister, 17 at the time, had called the police on their stepdad, who’d been sexually and physically abusing both girls for years.

Virgil, her sister, and their brother, who, at 13, was a year older than Virgil, would go directly into foster care, and not for the first time. When Virgil was 2 and the family was living in Phoenix, Arizona, the siblings were put into the state’s custody after their mom went on a drink-and-drug-fueled bender and left them unattended.

Holding a scrapbook inches from his face, Jessy Dussetschleger flips through pages and pages of pictures from his childhood. Smiling and tapping his adoptive mother on her shoulder, he points to a photo of himself with his siblings at a birthday party.

Touching memories from early childhood are a rarity for him.

Jessy, 22, was born deaf. His mother, a single mom, also was deaf and raised him in an abusive household in Corpus Christi. He was just 4 years old when Child Protective Services removed him from the home.

A Texas legislative panel is recommending an infusion of $75.3 million in emergency funding for the Department of Family and Protective Services to allow for caseworker raises and hire more people. But agency Commissioner Hank Whitman won’t get everything he requested.

The five-member special workgroup made up of Senate Finance Committee members has decided to recommend giving Whitman the money he asked for to increase salaries for Child Protective Services workers, but not enough to hire 550 new workers as he originally hoped. The funding would include $67.6 million in state general funds, while the rest would be federal money.

The panel’s plan would allow the agency to boost salaries by $12,000 and hire 136 new workers, including 50 new special investigators, 50 new investigative caseworkers and 36 new support staff members. Whitman had originally wanted to hire an additional 200 investigative caseworkers and an additional 100 special investigators.

The man Gov. Greg Abbott has put in charge of fixing Texas’ dysfunctional foster care system told state legislators on Wednesday he’d gladly take the brunt of their anger if it meant they’d give him more money to catch up on a backlog of 2,844 at-risk children awaiting the agency’s assistance.

“You can beat on me all day, I’m a tough guy, beat on me, I don’t care,” Department of Family and Protective Services Commissioner Hank Whitman told the Senate Finance Committee. “But I’m telling you right now, we need help, and it’s in a monetary way.”

Beat on him lawmakers did at a hearing convened just days after Whitman revealed his $53.3 million proposal to overhaul Child Protective Services, a feat that may require an army of 550 new caseworkers and investigators to help save abused and neglected Texas children.

Gov. Greg Abbott and other state leaders ordered the Department of Family and Protective Services Wednesday to ramp up efforts to protect endangered foster children and curb the backlog of ones waiting for homes.

Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Joe Straus released a joint letter to department Commissioner Hank Whitman directing him to immediately develop a plan to hire and train more special investigators to take up the backlog of at-risk kids who have not had a face-to-face interaction with Child Protective Services. The lawmakers are also calling on the agency to create a hiring and training schedule to get more caseworkers out into the field and to continue working closely with community organizations. The lawmakers also called recent news of children sleeping in hotels and CPS offices “unacceptable.”

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) – Texas is still failing to check on thousands of children who are the highest risk for abuse or neglect in the latest sign of trouble for an understaffed child protection agency that Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has pledged to overhaul, according to state data released Tuesday.On any given day alone around big cities such as Houston and Dallas, more than 200 children who are allegedly maltreated never get a face-to-face visit by a welfare investigator within 24 hours as the state requires, according to the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services.The agency has struggled to retain low-paid caseworkers, whose starting salaries are about $37,000 annually, and the turnover rate last year was about 33 percent, agency spokesman Patrick Crimmins said.

AUSTIN, Texas (KXAN) – The number of children in the state’s foster care system is at an all-time high. At least 30,000 children and teens across the state need permanent or temporary homes.

The Department of Families and Child Protective Services is pleading with religious leaders to help. State social workers say they are swamped. In the Austin-Travis County area alone, more than 1,600 children and teens are in the system without foster families.

“Children are coming into the system at an alarming rate without the support of the family,” said Val Jackson, a faith-based specialist with the department. “And the reality is our children are broken; and, our families need help. [The agency] can only do so much.”

SAN ANTONIO – A federal judge is taking action to fix what many call a “broken” foster care system. The judge is requiring three more investigators to look into The Department of Family and Protective Services. She has also doubled the amount of hours the team is expected to spend coming up with their recommendations, from about 1,000 hours to 2,000 hours.

Child Advocates San Antonio CEO Rick Cooke called the judge’s decision to beef up the investigation into the foster care system, a step in the right direction.

WHISTLEBLOWERS WANTED

CCHR is looking for anyone who knows of incidents of fraudulent prescribing, failure to follow Texas drugging guidelines for children or who has knowledge of illegal referral fees or kickbacks in the drugging of Medicaid children to come forward.

This includes knowledgeable employees of DFPS and HHSC, staff of any local office or clinic, any contractor, foster parent or citizen with knowledge.

Please use the short form below to get in touch with us and someone from our office will contact you. Your information is held in the strictest confidence.

Texas Psychiatry News

Abused children in Texas are being left in psychiatric facilities longer than they were six years ago as the state’s child protective services system grapples with federal court scrutiny and diminishing options, according to data obtained by The Texas Tribune. Last year, 17,151 Texas children were removed from abusive homes. While the agency could not say exactly how […]

Houston police found the 16-year-old foster child in a park in early November 2013, just a few days after she ran away from a residential treatment center in northwest Houston. Rosario, a baby-faced, black-haired girl who carried a little extra weight, said she’d been selling her body for money. The cops returned her to the […]